People Care about National Bow Tie Day

I knew that National Bow Tie Day is a big deal, but even I was surprised at the interest in the holiday that I saw.

There are two main indicators of what I observed.

First, I enjoyed a significant traffic bump to this website that week. We’re talking around a 200% increase across the major analytic measures. While I certainly trumped up the day through my social media channels — Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest — most of the new traffic came from organic searches. Those are when someone searched for something through a search engine and came to the site via a keyword. So, those people largely had no idea that this site existed and discovered it thanks to the holiday. Good thing I wrote about August 28 back in January so that the search engines had time to index it and allow it to climb up the rankings.

Second, although my first post about the day ranked highly for “National Bow Tie Day 2014” — a search term that still yielded plenty of traffic, I did temporarily lose ranking for the more general term that doesn’t include 2014. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I got crowded out by much bigger websites — like those of CNN, USA Today, Esquire, and MTV — that created galleries about the day (typically of famous bow tie wearers). On top of all of that was broadcast coverage — including Tom Keene’s indulgence on his Bloomberg show — that helped raise awareness. In some cases, these outlets’ articles were created years ago (long before I decided to start a niche fashion blog). However, some of the pages that pushed me down in the rankings were published that very day. For various SEO reasons, they were able to rank rather quickly. Either way, the point that I’m trying to make is that there’s major interest in the day. While there are some other days that similar attention, I doubt that many other holidays get such attention. Thus, my favorite neckwear enjoys more attention than most of the other holidays tracked by the Days of the Year site.

Of course, there were other indicators at play, too. For instance, the hashtag #NationalBowTieDay was popular during the day. No doubt that the politicians, celebrities, and other notable gentlemen publicly celebrating helped generate interest, too.

Needless to say, I’m stoked that there are heaps of peeps interested in National Bow Tie Day — one of the best days of the year, if you ask me. Hopefully, more people celebrate next year.